The present invention disclosed herein relates to an apparatus and method for treating a substrate, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for treating a substrate through a supercritical process.
Semiconductor devices are manufactured by forming circuit patterns on a substrate through various processes such as a photolithography process. During such processes, contaminants such as particles, organic contaminants, and metallic impurities are generated, which cause defects on a substrate and affect the yield of semiconductor device manufacturing processes. Therefore, cleaning processes are included in semiconductor device manufacturing processes to remove such contaminants.
Generally, a cleaning process is performed by removing contaminants from a substrate using a detergent, washing the substrate using deionized water (DI water), replacing the DI water with an organic solvent having low surface tension such as isopropyl alcohol (IPA), and evaporating the organic solvent. However, semiconductor devices having fine circuit patterns are not satisfactorily dried, and the fine circuit patterns may easily collapse even by low surface tension of an organic solvent during a drying process.
Thus, as a drying process, the use of a supercritical drying process increases, in which a supercritical fluid is used to dry semiconductor devices having a line width of about 30 nm or lower. Supercritical fluids mean any substance being at a temperature and pressure above its critical point and having both the gas and liquid properties. Supercritical fluids are outstanding in diffusion ability, permeation ability, and dissolving other substrates, and have little surface tension. Thus, supercritical fluids can be usefully used for dying substrates.
However, a process chamber for performing a supercritical process has a large foot print to maintain a high-pressure supercritical state, and thus the substrate throughput thereof is low.